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Talking to the Real Girl, Nancy Oliver
March 31, 2008

After enjoying an Oscar nomination for her debut screenplay, Lars and the Real Girl, Nancy Oliver isn’t resting on her laurels. The busy writer is currently inking a screenplay for Warner Bros. and has teamed once again with producer/director Alan Ball (Six Feet Under) for his new TV series, True Blood. “It’s a lot of fun,” Oliver tells me when discussing Blood. “Fangs, sex, blood, violence, lots of hot guys taking their shirts off…” From vampires to life-sized dolls, Oliver has kept her subjects varied, and on the eve of MGM/Fox’s April 15 DVD release of Lars, she spent some time talking to VB about her first film.

Oliver

Video Business: Congratulations on all your success with Lars! I understand that it took some time for things to get off the ground and for the film to get made.
Nancy Oliver: I finished [the screenplay] in 2001 or 2002. I can’t even remember now. And there were a couple of deals that came together and then fell apart. And then in 2005, it really got moving.

VB: How did you get the idea for the script?
Oliver: It came from a lot of different places. I can pin the real doll part of it on, well, I had a strange job that put me in contact with a lot of lonely guys and a lot of strange Web sites. You go on the real doll Web site, and it’s pretty weird. And the faces kind of haunted me and stayed with me, and I started to think up the story, and it brought in a lot of themes that I work with in general.

VB: Yeah, those dolls are kind of creepy looking.
Oliver: Yeah, they’re creepy. No question about it.

VB: Was it difficult to strike that balance between comedy involving the doll and the drama involving Lars?
Oliver: The doll ends up being a vehicle for healing for this guy. When I started it, I didn’t know how it would end. I kind of just followed the tale. It didn’t have a goal of making the doll an issue or anything like that. I stayed with Lars and whatever came out of that, heartwarming or whatever. And that’s what happened. It was mostly after the discovery of what the story was, and I didn’t plan it on purpose.

VB: With your background in TV, writing for Six Feet Under and now True Blood, what do you view as the difference between TV and film writing?
Oliver: I come from the theater. I made the transition first to TV. And TV for me, I could be wrong, it might be a personal thing, but it seems like sort of a halfway point between theater and film. There’s room for a fair amount of language and the structure is similar. With a screenplay, it took me a long time. It took me about five years to learn how to write a screenplay because I had to alter my perceptions in the way that I look at the world, into a more visual sense, so it took me awhile to get a hold of it. Lars is my first attempt really.

VB: For Lars, how much did the end product mirror the original script?
Oliver: Making a movie is a real collaboration with a lot of people, so what you’re seeing is an interpretation of the original script. Parts of it are very close, and parts of it are very different. That’s not like a qualitative judgment. It’s just the director and the actors work out their thing. My experience was unusual in that everyone seemed to have so much respect for the script. I was like, “Cut this. Cut that.” But they tried very hard to keep the feeling intact, so some parts are very close and some parts not so much.

Posted by Cheryl Cheng on March 31, 2008 | Comments (0)